


Surfacing

by Mojanna



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Depression, First Kiss, Idiots in Love, M/M, Pining, weirdly romantic trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-21 03:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3675492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mojanna/pseuds/Mojanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following Kavinsky's death, Ronan becomes vacant and withdrawn. Adam makes a deal with Cabeswater to fix whatever's wrong with the Greywaren, but that's before he witnesses Ronan's dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surfacing

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno, guys, this is what happens when I drink alone.

It happened slowly, piece by piece. The year waxed then waned and the lush rabble of summer gave way to crisped, curling leaves and a biting breeze. The heat and the haze faded in to memory, and with them went Ronan Lynch.

Oh, he didn’t actually go anywhere.

It was a bit more complicated than that. 

The summer didn’t completely retreat – never could completely retreat - not in Henrietta where Cabeswater nestled, secret unless you knew where to look. In Cabeswater, summer lived on in all its glory, bursting in to full bodied life amongst the chattering trees.

And Ronan Lynch stayed behind.

Not in person. He still went to classes, as much as he ever did – more really, now that the vacant look had settled behind his eyes and he’d stopped pulling at Gansey’s strings. He just never seemed to be fully there. He had become smudgy, like Noah, except no – not like Noah, because when Noah looked at you and when he spoke it wasn’t like he was underwater.

All of the life inside Ronan, the burning rage that had screamed in to an inferno over the break, coming to a grand finale at Kavinksy’s death, that had, well. Burned out. He didn’t smoulder anymore; he was a simmering heap of ash slumped over his desk in latin.

Adam almost missed the old shitbag Ronan. With Ronan gone, he was – well.

Lonesome.

 

Gansey fussed like a mother hen, of course, prodding at Ronan gently at first, then snapping in exasperation, before dangling the keys to the Pig in front of Ronan’s puckered forehead. 

Ronan watched the keys swinging, his eyes tracking the pendulum motion. He didn’t say anything. Gansey went to bed.

“We can’t just let him carry on like this,” he muttered to Adam the next day over the roof of the Camaro. 

The gas pump buzzed loudly in his left hand as he raked his right through his hair. It stayed stood up, conspiring with his teal polo shirt to make Gansey look like a strange, exotic bird.

Adam’s eyes flicked down to Ronan where he slumped in the passenger seat, assembling a trail of cracker crumbs on the dashboard for Chainsaw. 

“What do you propose we do?”

Adam knew how shoulders got to slumping so much. He wished he could tell Ronan how to snap out of it, but he couldn’t even remember how he’d managed it.

Sometimes Adam felt like the worst kind of useless.

“Maybe Cabeswater will help.”

 

Ronan did seem a bit better in the forest, the muscles in his shoulders relaxing fractionally and his smile a little sharper. He walked with Gansey, striding through the trees with something like the ghost of his old swagger.

“That doesn’t make any sense, you know.”

Adam coughed to cover how much Noah had made him jump.

“I’m just saying,” Noah continued. “A swagger can’t be a ghost.”

“Okay.”

“Neither can Ronan.”

“Okay.”

“Because Ronan’s still alive.”

Adam stared resolutely down at his feet as they walked, glaring at the frayed laces of his canvas shoes. The lump in his throat felt sharp, like it’d slice him when he swallowed.

Noah’s arm was cool and light as it draped over his shoulders.

“He’s taking us to the spring,” Noah whispered, his breath cold on Adam’s flushed cheek. “That’s his favourite part – the build up. The part when the light’s just turned yellow.”

Adam knew Noah went racing with Ronan sometimes, though he didn’t think they’d been since Kavinsky’s death. The thought of the two of them in the BMW, coiled tight before exploding along the road whooping and wild-eyed, churned Adam’s stomach. 

Street racing was stupid, reckless, a gamble with the sorts of cars that he could never afford.

He missed shitbag Ronan.

When they reached Ronan’s destination, a patch of springtime near the dream pool of fish, they sprawled between the trees and tried not to all stare at Ronan.

He looked comfortable, more at home in his own skin than he had for months. He leaned back against a gnarled tree trunk and dug his fingers in to the soil, smirking as he flicked dirt at a squealing Noah. Ronan so clearly belonged here that it made Adam ache, made him wish he could spare Ronan the empty hours of Aglionby and the pale pointlessness of life in the real world.

“Don’t you start,” Noah giggled, elbowing Adam in the ribs from where he’d scrambled away from Ronan.

Ronan’s eyes traced where their bodies touched, Noah draping himself across Adam like a cat on a heater.

Adam fought the urge to nudge him off, to show Ronan some space between them.

Ronan played with the dirt.

 

“He’s gone.”

Gansey’s voice was tinny through Adam’s crappy cell phone, but he sat bolt upright on his mattress.

“When?” Adam rasped, running a palm over his eyes. 

He was so tired the streetlight outside his window blurred in to an orange stain. He could still smell gasoline on his hands from the late shift at the garage.

“Just now. I heard the car leaving. I thought about going after him but then I thought –“

Gansey cut off abruptly, leaving Adam straining to hear with his good ear and shaking his phone experimentally.

“Spit it out, Gansey,” he growled.

“I think it should be you.”

Adam didn’t argue; he just hung up and pulled on some jeans.

He thought it should be him, too.

The cold of his car seat seeped through his t-shirt. Adam had forgot to grab a sweater. He wound the window down anyway, letting the winter air whip across his face and tangle in his hair. He drove away from Henrietta, away from the haze of light pollution and occasional rumble of car engines.

When he pulled in to the drive way of the Barns, the BMW was nowhere in sight.

Adam checked the garage just in case, walked around the main house peering in windows for tell-tale slants of light. He banged on the door of the main barn, shouting Ronan’s name.

When Adam called Gansey, hot shame poured liquid down his throat and pooled in his stomach. It should have been him to find Ronan.

“I lost him,” he croaked, and let his head thump against the car window.

 

Ronan’s body sprawled over the desk behind him was almost too much for Adam to bear. He had gaped outright when Ronan walked in to Latin, prowling straight to his usual seat and throwing himself in to it like nothing had happened.

Gansey and Adam exchanged incredulous looks over the matching bags under their eyes.

“Lynch,” Adam hissed, but then the substitute teacher swooped in and he dragged himself back to face the front. 

He heard Ronan shift in his chair behind him, half turning his good ear towards the sound.

The shifting stopped.

Adam fumed.

Latin lasted forever.

 

“Lynch!” Adam shouted, letting his rage propel him across the courtyard after Ronan’s retreating back. 

Ronan stilled but didn’t turn. Adam was so mad he could hear his own pulse. 

“What the hell are you playing at?” He burst out, dragging Ronan round to face him by his shoulder. 

Ronan swung round easily, his face etched in stone.

“Can I help you, Parrish?”

He sounded bored, the bastard actually sounded bored. Adam’s hands balled in to fists.

“You weren’t at the Barns last night,” he managed to grind out.

Ronan’s eyebrow shot up. He opened his mouth to speak but Adam pushed on.

“You weren’t at Monmouth either. Where were you?”

“Fuck off, Parrish,” Ronan snarled, “you’re not my mother.”

He stalked away then, his shoulders almost around his ears, and Adam gaped after him. That was the most Ronan the bastard had been for months.

He began to hatch a plan.

 

Adam lay spread-eagled across his mattress, the sharp springs digging in to the crick in his back. His mouth hung open, gentle snoring misting the cool night air. The sink in his bathroom gurgled. Rain tapped against his window pane.  
One heartbeat. Two.

The almighty crash of his window swinging open shocked Adam on to his feet before he fully woke up, his brain kicking in to gear in time to register the huge crack spider-webbed over his window pane. The glass trembled in the wooden frame but did not fall.

Adam breathed out.

Rain pattered against the floor of his apartment, and the branches of the nearby tree scratched insistently over his wall. Adam swallowed, closing his eyes for a brief moment before scrambling to get dressed. 

This was Cabeswater. This was the deal he had struck, the way he had promised to keep the Greywaren safe. Cabeswater would wake him when Ronan left, and Adam would follow after. The whispers of an unknown language echoed in his deaf ear as he staggered to his chipped sink. He ran a small pool of water, fervently wishing that Noah was there to worry over his soul. 

There was no need, in the end. The image of Cabeswater floated across Adam’s vision, with the BMW abandoned in a ditch outside and Ronan’s broad shoulders marching towards the trees.

He grabbed his car keys and shot out the door.

Adam’s mattress sighed in to the floor, heavy with rainwater and littered with leaves. It was ruined, as was his window.

Adam didn’t even notice. He was going to find Ronan Lynch.

 

Adam’s clothes clung to him, heavy and cold with rainwater as he tramped through the trees. He clenched his jaw to stop his teeth chattering, straining his good ear for signs of Ronan. In the end, there was no need. He found Ronan in the spring time.

Ronan lay stretched out on the ground, one arm flung across his eyes with the other trailing in the sparkling water of the dream pool. The surface rippled and winked as thousands of tiny fish roiled under the surface.

For a crazy moment Adam thought Ronan was dead, but the gentle rise and fall of Ronan’s chest showed he was only sleeping.

Adam forced himself to breathe too, matching Ronan’s slow inhalations. Then, before Adam could call out, the shadows of the clearing shifted. They slithered across the ground towards Ronan, clouding and clinging and thickening in the air just above his head. Adam stood rooted to the spot, horrified and entranced as Ronan manifested a dream in front of his eyes.

The shadows took shape and solidified, in the same uncomfortable-to-watch way that Noah sometimes materialised. 

Above Ronan’s stretched out body, a copy of Adam shivered in to life. Adam watched himself straddling Ronan’s hips, watched the way his thin lips quirked before dipping down to kiss Ronan’s sharp mouth. Beneath him, Ronan did not wake, but trailed his hand out of the pool and up the dream-Adam’s back.

The wet trail of his fingertips left a darkened trail on the dream-Adam’s t-shirt.

This wasn’t real.

This wasn’t happening.

Adam clenched his eyes shut to be sure, but the soft sound of Ronan’s moan made his eyes shoot open again. Adam blushed furiously as the copy of his ground his hips down against Ronan, causing the still sleeping boy to fist his hand in the t-shirt.

That would stretch the fabric, Adam thought numbly.

“You should wake him up and tell him.”

“Noah!” hissed Adam, reeling back, feeling strangely guilty though he wasn’t sure what for. He wasn’t the one writhing on the ground of the clearing, sucking – oh, god – sucking Ronan’s earlobe in to his mouth.

Ronan shifted at the noise, the dream-Adam flickering above him.

“Come on, come on,” Adam panicked, tugging the sleeve of Noah’s Aglionby sweater. 

He stumbled on a tree root as he tried to drag Noah away, and the trees around him hissed at once in a garbled, desperate clamour.

“I think you have to do what you promised,” Noah protested, pulling his arm free. “You have to help Ronan.”

Adam laughed manically, sweeping an arm towards where they’d left the dream-Adam and Ronan entwined. 

“I’m already helping Ronan! What do they want, a team effort?”

“Adam,” Noah warned quietly, before flickering out. The clearing was deadly quiet, no longer filled with trees’ whispers or Ronan’s moans.

“Is that an offer, Parrish?”

Adam turned back to Ronan sitting up, his forearms resting on his knees. He glared at Adam from his seat on the ground, rolling his eyes at Adam’s inability to speak or move.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Ronan spat as he pushed to his feet, brushing once at the seat of his pants before setting off in to the trees.

It took Adam a moment to spur himself in to action, to barrel after Ronan and call out his name. Ronan didn’t reply, and he knew Cabeswater far better than Adam ever would, and by the time Adam spilled out in to the field the BMW was already screaming in to the distance.

Noah didn’t keep Adam company on the drive back.

Adam didn’t blame him.

 

See, the thing was, Adam couldn’t bring himself to regret following Ronan.

He was more himself after that, less vacant, sharper, crueller. He spit bile at Adam whenever the two made eye contact, and relief that Ronan had returned warred with concern in Gansey’s eyes as he watched the poison spreading between the two of them.

Ronan was back, and Adam couldn’t regret what he’d done. 

Or what he’d seen.

The sounds of Ronan’s moans in the clearing crashed around his head at night. He curled up on top of his ruined mattress and bit hard enough on his forearm to leave a mark, but still the sound didn’t fade. It echoed in his deaf ear and rang through his dreams.

 

Sunday morning was torture, knowing that Ronan was downstairs in the church, thinking on his sins.

The thought that Adam was one of them rippled deliciously down his spine.

Adam thought of the way Ronan had gone to Cabeswater to dream, to show the trees what was in his soul, and he thought it sounded a lot like confession. 

Ronan was braver than Adam ever was.

He knew what he had to do, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes he would never have been able to persuade himself that Ronan Lynch truly wanted him; Adam treated any affection with wary distrust. He hadn’t thought Ronan capable of something as human as a crush, but he thought now that he hadn’t given Ronan enough credit.

Adam didn’t deserve Ronan at all.

But because Adam was ultimately a selfish being, a dirty, dusty survivor, he would try to have him anyway and live with the guilt.

Chainsaw was easy enough to coax. Adam pushed his duct-taped window open as gingerly as he could, wincing as it scraped and juddered over the rough window ledge. The raven scratched at the dust in the car park next to the BMW, but her beady eyes found Adam straight away and she flapped willingly enough to his outstretched wrist.

He left the window open despite the winter air, so that Ronan would know where she’d gone.

Kidnapping Ronan’s pet raven just to get him to talk.

Adam was such a low thing.

 

The pounding on Adam’s door jolted him away from his makeshift desk. He wiped the sweat off the palms of his hands on to his grubby jeans.

“Parrish!” Ronan bellowed, followed by a string of cursing. Adam swallowing, his throat bobbing.

“Come in,” he called weakly.

Adam’s front door banged against the wall, and his apartment seemed to shrink around him as Ronan stormed in. The tightness of Ronan’s eyes relaxed just slightly as he spotted Chainsaw perched on the mattress, but a murderous expression quickly chased any relief from his face.

“What the fuck,” Ronan spat, stalking slowly towards where Adam hunched over his books.

Adam didn’t think he would hurt him – he knew Ronan would never do that, not really, no matter how angry he got – but years of expecting his father’s blows had him flinching and leaping up and away.

“Oh, please,” Ronan snarled, knocking Adam’s chair out the way and continuing to prowl after him. “You know I’m not here for that.”

“Why are you here, then?” Adam whispered, forgetting his master plan. Terror had made his mind slow, filled with white noise.

“You took my fucking bird,” Ronan growled, but with visible effort he forced himself to a stop. A nerve leapt in his forehead, and Adam could see how much he was shaking even from a distance.

Adam mentally added this moment to his already ample store of self-loathing.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped, his heart thundering against his chest. “I just wanted to talk.”

“Then talk,” Ronan jeered, folding his arms over his chest, his shoulders hunched against his neck. “Say whatever you have to say, and I’ll be on my merry way.”

Adam didn’t want him to go.

He wished he never came.

“I’ve been thinking, about – about the dream.” Ronan’s eyes glittered with menace, but Adam took a laboured breath and continued. “The dream I saw in Cabeswater.”

“No shit,” Ronan spat, but Adam was already shaking his head.

“No, I mean I’ve – I’ve been thinking about it.” He could feel the blood pooling hot in his cheeks, and he broke off Ronan’s gaze. “A lot,” he finished lamely.

Silence stretched through the room. When Adam risked a glance back at Ronan, his arms were still crossed over his chest and his expression was unreadable.

“The fuck am I supposed to do with that, Parrish?” The shadows on Ronan’s face were terrible.

Adam forced himself to move forward, his muscles heavy as lead. 

“Um,” he said as placed a hand against the spot where Ronan’s neck and shoulder muscle met. The muscle leapt against his touch, quivering under the skin.

A glimmer of hope warred with fury and humiliation on Ronan’s pale face. Adam couldn’t stand to look at it, to look at the mess he’d made, and so he closed his eyes and with a shuddered breath, he stepped in to Ronan’s space.

When he pressed his lips against Ronan’s, he half wondered if Ronan would bite him.

Ronan did no such thing, standing statue-like beneath Adam’s tentative efforts at showing Ronan how he felt. He would have preferred being bitten, Adam thought, as he pulled reluctantly away.

His chest felt caved out, his heart bleeding and raw. 

“Sorry,” Adam whispered, his misery etched on his face as he dropped his hand from Ronan’s shoulder. It hung uselessly at the end of his arm; he couldn’t remember how to hold himself. His body felt like a jumble of parts, a puppet with half snapped strings.

“You fucking should be,” Ronan muttered, before gripping Adam tight by the waist. 

Tight enough to leave bruises, Adam thought, as Ronan’s tongue slid hot over his. He hoped, he prayed tight enough.

He had done enough damage to Ronan, to be sure – the breath rushed out of his lungs as his back hit the mattress, interrupting this thought. Ronan’s fingers left trails on his skin, scorching a path and signing his name as he tugged Adam’s t-shirt over his head. 

When Ronan bent to mouth at Adam’s hip, it felt like more than forgiveness. It felt like the surge of the ley line, like the furious want that had been burning Adam up all his life had been fanned in to a forest fire. Cabeswater was burning, and Adam burned with it, and Ronan laughed and nipped at his skin.

When Adam lay back, his vision was blurred, and his hands shook as they clutched at Ronan’s shoulders. 

What a fine thing, to be lost and lonesome, and to find each other in the flames.


End file.
